The game was won by the Red Sox middle relievers, who pitched 3 1/3 innings of no hit ball. The unlikely winning pitcher was Matt Barnes, who bailed David Price out of trouble in the fifth, the retired the Astros 1-2-3 in the sixth. He never allowed a ball out of the infield.
What a baseball world we live in, where the starter and closer are ineffective, but the middle guys pick them up.
In fact, huge wins, since both teams won on the road.
The mighty Red Sox could fare no better than the Indians against Houston pitching. Remember I mentioned that the Indians went 3-for-30 in each of their first two games against the ‘Stros.
Well guess what the Red Sox did this time … 3-for-30.
The rankings will get scrambled this week:
Georgia, which came into the weekend ranked second in the country, got absolutely curb-stomped by LSU in Baton Rouge, 36-16. Georgia was scoreless in the first half.
#6 West Virginia, #7 Washington, #15 Wisconsin and #16 Miami lost road games (Wisconsin got crushed), while #8 Penn State lost at home.
With four higher-ranked teams losing, one wonders how high #10 UCF can climb.
The Brewers continue to win with their philosophy that there’s no such thing as a starting pitcher.
Hey, if it works it works.
An obscure Brewer relief pitcher, Brandon Woodruff, homered off Kershaw, the best pitcher of his era. Cue Mel Allen saying, “How ABOUT that?” Woodruff pitched innings three and four – and got the W to go with his batting exploits. So that’s a pretty big day for a kid who had pitched only 85 innings in his career.
It’s baseball’s Thor, and his bat broke on a swing-and-miss!
The Yankees made it exciting in the ninth, but fell a run short.
The Yankees weren’t really overpowered in the series. Although they lost that 16-1 blowout, they actually outscored Boston 13-11 in the other three games. Two of their losses were by a single run.
The league championships seem to have the right teams for a change. The Bosox and Astros had the best records in the AL. The Brewers had the best record in the NL, and the Dodgers had the best run differential (by a very wide margin).
Two great match-ups.
The end of the Cleveland Indians’ season also means the end for Chief Wahoo
I’m certainly not one to argue for political correctness, but the abolition of this symbol was long overdue. Some people argued against this decision based on tradition. After all, that logo has been around for more than 70 years. But is tradition inherently a good thing? No. Hell, slavery was a tradition in the South.
If you take a look at the other, comparably offensive, racial and ethnic portrayals from the 1940s (buck-toothed Japanese soldiers in ultra-thick glasses, and many levels of “darky” iconography) you have to wonder how this particular one endured. I guess the reason has something to do with power, or rather lack of it. The Japanese are now one of our closest allies and “Japanese Americans” are just “Americans” now. People of African heritage have become a significant power bloc. But Native Americans have not yet obtained a significant voice in the national opera. I just thought about it now, and I can’t name a single famous Native American alive today.
OK, maybe Elizabeth Warren.
(Just fuckin’ withcha. On a serious note, I think Wayne Newton is 50%, but I can’t think of anyone else at 50% or more.)
As predicted, UCF did finally make the top ten. Do they belong there? I dunno. The computer ratings suggest they are still not at that level. Sagarin’s calculations place them 26th. There are two other undefeated teams in the East half of the American Conference, but UCF doesn’t play them until their final two games, so you can expect the Knights to stay undefeated for a while, and maybe even creep a bit higher on the rankings ladder.
With their win over Oklahoma, the Texas Longhorns vaulted over several teams into the #9 spot.
Florida leapt into the #14 spot with their win over LSU.
The top four remained unchanged.
The Indians and Braves are gone. The Yankees are still alive, but limping.
It does not look good for the Yanks after the Sox pummeled them and their ace, Luis Severino, in front of a deeply disappointed Bronx crowd. The final score was 16-1, a historic beatdown which was the worst post-season loss in Yankee history.
The Yankees used six pitchers, not all of whom are actually supposed to be pitchers, and the Sox scored on every single one of them.
The Red Sox’s unheralded utility player, Brock Holt, hit for the cycle. In the entire history of MLB, no previous player had ever hit for the cycle in the post-season. He finished it with a homer off the Yankees’ second string catcher.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball, Red Sox starter Nathan Eovaldi handcuffed the Yankees and threw several pitches clocked in triple figures, including three against Aaron Judge in one at bat. Eovaldi has always been able to bring it, but so far has not been able to convert that into much of a career (44-53 4.16 for five different teams).
After three games in Cleveland, the Browns are undefeated at home. As ol’ Mel Allen used to say, “How ABOUT that?”
The Rams and Chiefs are still undefeated, although the Rams needed a furious fourth-quarter comeback to stay unblemished.
The Jets finally had something to crow about. Isaiah Crowell rushed for 219 yards on only 15 carries as the Jets steamrolled over the Broncos!
The Braves stay alive; the Rockies do not.
The post-season often brings new heroes to our attention. The Braves got a grand slam from their lead-off hitter, Ronald Acuna Jr, a 20-year-old kid who appears to be an upcoming superstar. He had a .918 OPS in 2018, his rookie year. He led the team in homers despite limited playing time, and also tossed 16 stolen bases into the mix. The Dodgers battled back from Acuna’s blow to achieve a 5-5 tie, but the Braves’ veteran star, Freddie Freeman, put the game away with a homer of his own. The Braves managed to produce six runs with only four hits at exactly the right times.
The Rockies gave Cleveland and the Cubs a battle for the least post-season offense. They were shut out again Sunday, having gone home with only two runs in three games. Moreover, they were shut out in Coors Field, where they led the majors in home OPS during the regular season, at .852. They actually have one of the weakest offenses on baseball, with a road OPS of .665 (the MLB low is .654), but Coors normally covers a multitude of sins. Unfortunately for the Rocks, those sins were right out in the open on Sunday.
The Brewers’ post-season ERA is 0.64! Sunday’s game illustrates how much baseball has changed in recent years. The Brewers used six pitchers. The starter did not go five innings, which he must do in order be awarded a win, so the win went to some middle reliever you never heard of, a 23-year-old rookie named Corbin Burnes, who is undefeated for life! (7-0 in the regular season, 1-0 in the playoffs). The Brewers had two other relievers who were 6-1 and 8-1 in the regular season. That’s 21-2 from three guys who combined for fewer than 200 innings pitched.
Starters are not what they used to be. The Brewers managed their three brilliant post-season pitching performances without a single starter lasting more than five innings.
What’s it like to play for Alabama? Here’s a hint: Saban reamed everyone out because they only won by five touchdowns! (65-31) He pointed out that you don’t really “win” if you allow 31 points.
So there’s that.
Now back to reality.
There were a few upsets this week:
#5 LSU lost their first game, to #22 Florida
#7 Oklahoma lost their first game. They lost a typical Big 12 shoot-out (48-45) to the Longhorns (#19). There’s not a lot of defense in the Big 12, is there? I imagine Austin was jumping on Saturday night. Texas/OU weekend was always a crazy time in Austin, even when it was an away game for the ‘Horns, and especially after a Texas win.
#8 Auburn picked up a second loss against Mississippi State, and it was not close. Auburn never scored a TD in the 23-9 rout.
#13 Kentucky woke up from their dream. They lost to the Aggies in OT.
#14 Stanford got absolutely clobbered by unranked Utah, 40-21.
UCF continued to win. That’s about a thousand in a row. They were undefeated last year, including a Peach Bowl win over Auburn, and they are undefeated again this year. They are kind of the small-time Alabama, as they win every game by a mile (48-20 this week). So do you think they are in the top ten? Not yet. They are #12, but the losses by three higher-ranked teams should vault them up to #9 or #10, so a tip of the hat to them for rising that high out of a non-major conference. Of course, the other side of the coin is that Sagarin’s computer ratings place them much farther down (29th in the country) because of their weak competition. (They are ranked 158th in “difficulty of schedule.”)
The Yanks tied up the series thanks to three homers (two by Gary Sanchez) and a great start by Tanaka.
As for the Indians …they can’t wait to get to Cleveland. Remember yesterday when they went 3-for-30? Well they went 3-for-30 again today. It’s easy to calculate their batting average. It’s exactly .100, a buck even, the ol’ George Washington, the dreaded half Mendoza. They have managed to turn the Astros pitching staff into the 1907 Cubs.
(The Cubs had an ERA of 1.73 that year. That is the modern record. The second best is the 1909 Cubs at 1.74, followed by the 1906 Cubs at 1.76. The 1908 Club really slumped, limping in at a lame 2.14. That was quite a pitching staff, headed by Three-Finger Brown!)
You can’t say the Brewers game was boring. The Rockies tied it up in their last chance and the Brewers won it on an extra-inning walk-off.
Meanwhile, the Dodger game was decided early. The Braves put up no fight at all against Hyun-Jin Ryu.
In a bizarre strategy for this one-and-done game, Oakland started Liam Hendriks, a career middle reliever and occasional spot starter with a career ERA of 4.72 and only 25 innings pitched all year. Almost needless to say, the tough top of the Yankee line-up scored immediately, putting up two runs after their first two batters, courtesy of a monster homer by Aaron Judge.
Oakland started using this strategy in September. Hendriks started eight games in that single month. In the period from September 12th to the 21st, Hendricks started four games in 10 days. The strategy sort of worked. In the last seven of those eight games, pitching exactly one inning each time, Hendricks allowed no earned runs, and only four hits altogether.
In terms of winning, however, the strategy achieved mediocre results. The A’s won just four of the eight games he started.
I suppose all this discussion of Hendricks is really just academic. The A’s scored only two runs, which is unlikely to produce a visiting win at the new Yankee Stadium, which has been a hitters’ paradise. The Yankees average 5.6 runs scored per game at home, so the odds against a visitor beating them with two runs are about 8-1. The reality was even harsher than those theoretical odds. There were eleven times this year when the visiting team scored exactly two runs at Yankee Stadium, and the Yankees won all eleven. In other words, the A’s weren’t going to win with two runs even if Hendricks had struck out the side.
Talk about a sudden fall from grace. The Cubbies finished game 162 with the best record in the NL. After a few short days and only two games, they will be watching the playoffs on TV with the rest of us.
For the second game in a row, they could not produce any offense in the friendly confines. They could manage only five singles and a double in 13 innings. Combined with the previous day’s game, their batters went 9-for-71. That’s a mighty .127 batting average if you’re scoring at home.
They lost both games at home despite a sterling staff ERA of 2.05 and a solid performance from both starters, who allowed only two runs between them.
And the year before that he hit .244
At the end of last year, he was the first player to have the same batting average three years in a row in 400 or more at bats, so at this point he has achieved a feat that will probably never be duplicated unless they let me play. I’m pretty sure I could hit .000 every year.
That flat batting average makes it sound like he’s making no progress, but the really important thing is this: every year in the majors he has hit more homers than the year before. His progress: 11-22-27-42-43-48. He led the American League this season.
He’s now at the point where he gets more extra-base hits than singles. Can he keep increasing the four-baggers? Unlikely. It’s getting more difficult to improve as the bar gets higher. But don’t count him out.
There were no major changes except that Stanford plummeted from #7 to #14 and five new teams appeared in the bottom five slots.
The L.A. Dodgers have won the NL West for the 3,000th consecutive year. Or maybe it’s really only six.
Nolan Arenado homered, so Yelich would have lost the triple crown even if he had launched one. (He finished two behind Arenado. Of course Arenado plays at Coors, so he hit 38 at home, none on the road. I’m just fuckin’ witcha. It was 23-15. Matt Carpenter actually led the NL in road homers with 23. )
Here’s an odd fact: The Dodgers won their division despite the fact that they had no pitcher with more than 11 wins.
Next up: the wild-card games. One and done for the losers.
Tuesday: Rockies vs the Cubs, winners to face the Brewers
Wednesday: A’s vs the Yankees, winners to face the Red Sox.
The very next round could feature two bitter rivalries: Cubs/Brewers and Yankees/Red Sox
The Bears are much better than I thought. They scored 38 in the first half against a fairly respectable team!
The Rams looked great again and are now the only 4-0 team. (The Chiefs can join them tomorrow.) The Rams’ QB Jared Goff had a “perfect” QB rating of 158.3 on the strength of 465 yards and 5 TDs.
One personal note. My home state of New York has three football teams. You’d think maybe one of them would be at least mediocre, but no-o-o-o-o-o. All three of them are 1-3.